It can be important to the operation of an organization to know the status of employees within the organization's work force during the business day. For example, it can be important to know whether an employee is in the office, at lunch, in a meeting, on vacation, etc. This is especially the case for service organizations that need to have effective and timely response to client or customer needs.
A legal organization, for example, may have offices in a number of locations and have various staff and attorneys employed at the various sites. To provide responsive legal service to its clients, it can be important for the organization to know the current status of each lawyer or staff person. This status information can be helpful for a number of reasons. For example, if a client needs to talk to an attorney who is, for some reason, unavailable, someone else in the organization could check the status of the employee and provide accurate information about that person's whereabouts.
Conventional planning and scheduling software applications provide some functionality for maintaining schedules that can be accessed by other employees. These applications, however, are often limited in scope and require each user to grant access to all other users. These conventional software applications do not provide a sufficient way to maintain or access information about the current status of employees.